who would care about the precise size of the pills? as if there was a chance that they would be 5cm long? do they come in different sizes, like clothes, so that you could choose your perfect fit?

Two potential reasons.

1. Some people have difficulty swallowing and would rather have a smaller pill over a big one.

2. Marketing. Showing the "actual" size of a pill in relation to a cometeing product can make a stronger association that the pill is actually more powerful. If you have pill A and pill B, and three of A lasts 12 hours, but one of B lasts 12 hours, the marketing is better if you can show that B is the same size as one of A. If B was significantly larger than A then it sends the message that all they did was cram three A's together. W

One of those weird things people forget are actual "units" themselves. A nickel is five cents, but a dime is one dime. Something over a centimeter, less than two. Having neither a dime nor a ruler handy is something of a handicap at answering that question.

they should have made it a Java applet that detects the screen resolution and then creates the image based on that!

But then you gotta worry about the size of the monitor.

oops. good point

Not really. People forget that CSS supports units other than pixels, and 1cm == 1cm == 1cm no matter what size monitor you have--the browser will adjust to fit based on the perceived DPI (or DPCm, if you like) of the display device. (It doesn't matter whether you have a 17", 15" or 3" monitor--the DPI is what counts.)

Not really. People forget that CSS supports units other than pixels, and 1cm == 1cm == 1cm no matter what size monitor you have--the browser will adjust to fit based on the perceived DPI (or DPCm, if you like) of the display device. (It doesn't matter whether you have a 17", 15" or 3" monitor--the DPI is what counts.)

That might be true in X and on Mac OS, but in Windows it's common that display DPI is set to 96 or 120 - no matter what the monitor's actual DPI is. And if the windowing system doesn't have the correct value, how will a browser get it (not to mention the problems way too many programs have if DPI is set to anything but 96).

Not really. People forget that CSS supports units other than pixels, and 1cm == 1cm == 1cm no matter what size monitor you have--the browser will adjust to fit based on the perceived DPI (or DPCm, if you like) of the display device. (It doesn't matter whether you have a 17", 15" or 3" monitor--the DPI is what counts.)

That might be true in X and on Mac OS, but in Windows it's common that display DPI is set to 96 or 120 - no matter what the monitor's actual DPI is. And if the windowing system doesn't have the correct value, how will a browser get it (not to mention the problems way too many programs have if DPI is set to anything but 96).

This is in fact a bug in Windows - the code is there to set things based on the EDID block from the monitor, but it's been broken since (at least) Win2k and we can only presume that it's not likely to be fixed. The other systems differ only in that their implementations of this actually work.

This is also the reason why the Windows fonts change size when you change the resolution. That is not supposed to happen; fonts are measured in "points", which are 1/72th of an inch (or 1/12th of a pica).

who would care about the precise size of the pills? as if there was a chance that they would be 5cm long? do they come in different sizes, like clothes, so that you could choose your perfect fit?

Two potential reasons.

1. Some people have difficulty swallowing and would rather have a smaller pill over a big one.

2. Marketing. Showing the "actual" size of a pill in relation to a cometeing product can make a stronger association that the pill is actually more powerful. If you have pill A and pill B, and three of A lasts 12 hours, but one of B lasts 12 hours, the marketing is better if you can show that B is the same size as one of A. If B was significantly larger than A then it sends the message that all they did was cram three A's together. W

Extra disingenuous when you realize that between 50 and 99% of the pill is just inert buffer anyway, often cellulose and/or chalk, so the size can be radically altered without changing the potency in the slightest.

Extra disingenuous when you realize that between 50 and 99% of the pill is just inert buffer anyway, often cellulose and/or chalk, so the size can be radically altered without changing the potency in the slightest.

Many pills seem to use lactose - a sugar that a surprising number of people have difficulty digesting!

I think you forgot something here, projectors. I don't think many projectors are equipped with distance measuring laser beams (but, that would be cool to have) so that they can use trigonometry to calculate the dpi of the projection.